Cancelling plans

Here there is a video about cancelling plans from the Blog "mmmEnglish". 

Very easy to understand with full transcripts.

Here there is the link to the blog:

https://www.mmmenglish.com/2017/09/04/cancelling-plans-in-english/

And here the transcript in case you want it.

Hello I’m Emma from mmmEnglish! Have you ever made a plan with someone, but then realised that you need to change the plan or cancel it?

In English, you need to be careful about the language that you use to make sure that you’re doing it politely. Now, there’s lots of reasons why you would need to change your plans or cancel your plans in English.

Perhaps you genuinely can’t meet someone because something more important or urgent has come up. Perhaps you’ve double booked yourself – and that means that you’ve made two appointments at the same time without realising it, so you need to cancel one. And other times you might just be feeling lazy or you just don’t feel like meeting them. But of course, you don’t want to offend someone by telling them that!

Cancelling plans can be a little uncomfortable, a little awkward. So in this lesson I’m going to give you some useful expressions that will help you to change or cancel your plans in English!

Now, these expressions will be useful for formal appointments that you’ve made, like, at the doctors or the dentists, with a
work client or a colleague, your child school principal or even a Skype lesson with a new English teacher!

But they can also be used informally as well, when you’ve made plans to have a coffee with friends or meet a date for dinner or even to cancel or change a meeting time with a new friend that you’ve met online.

Break the news

So, the first thing you’ll need to do is “break the news” and this idiom means to tell someone something – especially if it’s something that they’re not expecting to hear or it’s bad news. To “break the news” start with something like
“I’m calling because…” or
“The reason I need to speak to you is…”

So if you’re at a professional office, for example, you could say “I need to cancel or change my appointment.”If you’re talking to a colleague that you don’t know that well, you could say “I won’t be able to attend the meeting on Thursday.”But with a colleague that you do know well, you might say “I can’t make it to the meeting on Thursday.” It’s a little more informal.
And, with a friend you could say “I can’t make it to dinner on Friday.”

Now, these expressions are great if you’re cancelling or rescheduling in a reasonable amount of time, you know, with
enough notice. But let’s be real, sometimes we aren’t as organised as we want to be and we need to change or cancel an appointment without much warning, right? Perhaps the meeting or the appointment is tomorrow or it’s even the
same day!

So then, you really should include an apology. It’s polite to include an apology any time that you change plans but if you do it at late notice you must apologise and you can do that simply by adding an introduction to your sentence.
“I’m really sorry, but… I need to cancel.”
“I’m so sorry for the late notice, but… I need to cancel.”
“My apologies, I need to cancel.”